Mary Beard sets out to separate the historical Julius Caesar from the marble bust and the Shakespeare quote. She traces his rise from an ambitious, debt-ridden aristocrat to the man who crossed the Rubicon and made himself Rome's one-man ruler, asking how spin and self-promotion carried him there as much as military conquest did. Beard visits Roman sites and reads the sources against each other, testing whether the assassination on the Ides of March 44 BC was really about restoring the Republic or about personal grievance dressed up as principle. She also chases the smaller, stranger questions: how Caesar hid his baldness, and whether his last words were anything like the line Shakespeare gave him. The film's real interest is legacy, drawing a direct line from Caesar's image-making to the propaganda tricks of later strongmen, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump included. Caesar's name survives in the calendar and in political language two thousand years later, and Beard makes the case that the tricks survived with it.